Natural sorting algorithm in PHP with support for Unicode?

Question

Is it possible to sort an array with Unicode / UTF-8 characters in PHP using a natural order algorithm? For example (the order in this array is correctly ordered):

Answer 1

I struggled with asort with this issue.

Sorting:

Array
(
    [xa] => África
    [xo] => Australasia
    [cn] => China
    [gb] => Reino Unido
    [us] => Estados Unidos
    [ae] => Emiratos Árabes Unidos
    [jp] => Japón
    [lk] => Sri Lanka
    [xe] => Europa Del Este
    [xw] => Europa Del Oeste
    [fr] => Francia
    [de] => Alemania
    [be] => Bélgica
    [nl] => Holanda
    [es] => España
)

put África at the end. I solved it with this dirty little piece of code (which is fit for my purpose and my timeframe):

$sort = array();
foreach($retval AS $key => $value) {
    $v = str_replace('ä', 'a', $value);
    $v = str_replace('Ä', 'A', $v);
    $v = str_replace('Á', 'A', $v);
    $v = str_replace('é', 'e', $v);
    $v = str_replace('ö', 'o', $v);
    $v = str_replace('ó', 'o', $v);
    $v = str_replace('Ö', 'O', $v);
    $v = str_replace('ü', 'u', $v);
    $v = str_replace('Ü', 'U', $v);
    $v = str_replace('ß', 'S', $v);
    $v = str_replace('ñ', 'n', $v);
    $sort[] = "$v|$key|$value";
}
sort($sort);

$retval = array();
foreach($sort AS $value) {
    $arr = explode('|', $value);
    $retval[$arr[1]] = $arr[2]; 
}